By Hannah Ng and Tiffany Meier
April 3, 2023Updated: April 4, 2023
TikTok CEO Chew Shou Zi
testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Capitol Hill in
Washington on March 23, 2023. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is using TikTok to wage
unrestricted warfare on the United States by indoctrinating American youngsters
with the Chinese regime’s values, according to Casey Fleming, CEO of
intelligence, strategy,
and cybersecurity firm BlackOps Partners.
“Social media is a tool in their war chest. So they use it as an
intelligence weapon, and also a cognitive weapon to distribute propaganda, to
change your children’s values and your values into much more stronger values
toward the CCP, and against Americans, or against the left or against the
right, or Democrats or Republicans, or black or white, to start to stir up that
infighting,” Fleming told “China in Focus” on NTD, the sister media
outlet of The Epoch Times.
According to Fleming, TikTok is one of the tools used in the
unrestricted warfare that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is waging against
America.
“Any social media coming out of China, in fact, any type of
technology—computers, hardware, software, digital cables, accessories, and so
on, even appliances—those are intelligence-collecting weapons, because they are
engaged in this thing called unrestricted warfare,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter whether it’s TikTok, or whether it’s Shein, the
number two app right now in the United States, or whether it’s Temu, which is
the number three app and, also, the Amazon Killer, and also Chinese gaming
apps. And now on the horizon, we have Lemon8, which is supposedly the TikTok
replacement if the U.S. government bans TikTok,” he added.
Shein has operation centers in several major global markets,
including Singapore, China, and the United States, and is now serving clients
in over 150 countries, according to its website.
Temu, an online marketplace, was founded in Boston in 2022
by PDD Holdings Inc., which also operates
Pinduoduo in China.
Nefarious Intentions
Fleming pointed to Sen. Ed Markey’s (D-Mass.) comment that TikTok is not the only
social media platform that poses a threat to our nation’s children and teens,
but that western Big Tech companies also have a case to answer.
Fleming agreed that American Big Tech and social media giants also
collects users’ data, but that they do it primarily to increase profits.
“The U.S. has social media, and they collect data on kids and
parents and anybody using social media. It’s really to exploit our kids. They
do brain hijacking, and it’s all about a dopamine cycle of all the clicks that
they do,” he said.
“And it’s really all
about profits, because for those companies it’s all about profits and market
share.
“There’s really not a nefarious intent behind the United States’
[companies]—other than making too much money and gaining too much market share
from a monopoly standpoint, and the harm that it actually does to the
children,” he added.
Meanwhile, Fleming believes that Chinese social media has ill
intentions towards American children.
“The harm that it causes is this brain highjacking. It changes
their values. It causes infighting, antisocial behavior, it changes their
thinking, it limits their critical thinking capability, it increases their
anxiety, their depression, their suicide,” he said.
Their aim is to make “our children think that the CCP or China is
a friendlier, better country than their own United States,” he said.
“There is no difference between the U.S. and China, the CCP, other
than the nefarious use as a war tool, a tool in the war chest, by the CCP. With
the U.S., you’re still being exploited—it’s still digital fentanyl that’s being
exploited for money and profit share,” he said.
He singled out Lemon8, the social media app that is also owned by
Bytedance, TikTok’s parent company.
Bytedance is reportedly calling on American users to turn to
Lemon8 as a substitute for Tiktok.
Fleming said that “you have to assume Lemon8 is also a weaponized
application, because it’s coming from the CCP.”
The Epoch Times has
reached out to Bytedance for comments.
Replace
China’s Trojan horse
As U.S. lawmakers are dancing around the issue of censorship and
First Amendment freedoms in relation to a potential ban on TikTok, Fleming
noted that America is already in the midst of what he described as World War 3.
“So it’s a wartime environment. We’re going to have to suffer some
contractions, some changes. Because if we’re going to win this war, we have to
understand that these guys are using a Trojan horse against our families, our
children, our companies, and so on,” he said.
Fleming suggested that the United States can join with its allies
to create platforms that can replace the malicious Chinese apps.
“What I’d like to see is other countries step up in the free
world, like the UK, Canada, Australia, and all of our other allies, to say,
‘Look, we’re in this. So we’re going to be doing technology together with these
platforms to replace these nefarious platforms that are coming in as Trojan
horses,’” Fleming said.
The Epoch Times has
reached out to Bytedance for comment, but had not received a reply before this
article was published.
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